Extract from Petra Pasternak’s article “3 Key Challenges to Preserving Slack Data for Litigation and Investigations”
In today’s workplace, collaboration tools like Slack make it seamless for teams to stay connected, share files, and communicate in real time.
But all that electronic data — measured these days in gigabytes, if not terabytes — is logged, tagged, and potentially discoverable in an investigation or litigation.
For legal professionals tasked with defensibly preserving potentially relevant data, the path is fraught with complexity. Collaboration tools were not designed with traditional ediscovery in mind. In addition to the sheer quantity of data produced in Slack, the platform presents a whole host of other discovery challenges. One of the biggest is viewing Slack data in context. Unlike emails, Slack communications are unstructured and dynamic — with multiple users, storage locations, versions of shared documents, and varying levels of retention. It’s tough to preserve, collect, and produce Slack ESI by relying on traditional ediscovery methods.
To effectively preserve Slack data, legal professionals need to understand the structure of communications in various channels and workspaces, how hyperlinked documents work within the platform, and how its retention policies impact data preservation and collection.
